The thoughts and perceptions of an aspiring writer on life and the world around her

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Musical – “In the Arboretum”

However, Finn and Erewhon had no idea that they sent the Baudelaires on an errand similar to sending a kid to the candy store with a request to buy the worst candy that’s hardest to find. For the arboretum contains all the stuff that washed ashore that Ishmael had hauled away which include junk, books, and even foodstuffs. As Snicket describes it, “Stretched out as far as the eye could see were pile of objects, heaps of items, towers of evidence, bales of materials, clusters of details, stacks of substances, hordes of pieces, arrays of articles, constellations of details, galaxies of stuff, and universes of things – an accumulation, an aggregation, a compilation, a concentration, a crowd, a herd, a flock, and a register of seemingly everything on Earth.” There’s so much Violet can use to invent, plenty for Klaus to read, and a lot for Sunny to cook. But before they get too distracted, they try to locate some weapons (though I don’t see why Violet could just make some). Then Inky heads of to search for something, leading the children to discover Ishmael’s footprints and the fact he’s been sneaking inside the arboretum on a regular basis. He even uses a periscope to predict the weather. Yet, what truly astonishes them is what they find in the Captain’s Log, which not just includes Ishmael’s entries, but also those by, wait for it…their parents.

Naturally, I went with Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in which Joel recounts the events over the first 50 years of his life or at least prior to the release of Stormfront. In this version the Baudelaires recount all the stuff they found in the arboretum which corresponds to their respective hobbies (well, Violet and Klaus’s anyway).